The Commvault software protects Amazon EC2 instances by using a hypervisor, which represents an AWS account, and associated VM groups, which identify the instances to back up. Each VM group has a backup plan that specifies scheduled backups, storage location, and retention. You can also perform on-demand backups.
Creation of AMIs for IntelliSnap Backups
The Commvault software can orchestrate the creation of cloud-native Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) as a rapid recovery point when you enable IntelliSnap backup on the VM group. During an IntelliSnap backup, the software orchestrates and manages the creation of an AMI and the associated Amazon EBS snapshots, which are retained according to the retention settings in the backup plan. If an Amazon EC2 instance fails to create an AMI during an IntelliSnap backup of a VM group, the backup job is marked as completed with errors.
UEFI Boot Mode
To back up Amazon EC2 instances that have UEFI boot mode enabled, there must be at least one UEFI-enabled AMI present in the AWS account performing the backup. If a UEFI boot enabled AMI is not present, the backup will fail.
For more information, see the following:
Amazon EC2 Backup Using Amazon EBS Direct APIs
The software uses Amazon EBS direct APIs to perform Change Block Tracking (CBT) backups of Amazon EC2 instances and associated Amazon EBS volumes. To accelerate backup activity, Amazon EBS direct APIs identify changes between two Amazon EBS snapshots. You can use Amazon EBS direct APIs or CBT with streaming backups, and with the backup copy operation of IntelliSnap backups. By default, CBT is enabled when you create a new Amazon EC2 VM group, and you can enable CBT for existing VM groups. For more information about CBT for Amazon EC2, see Changed Block Tracking for AWS.
Important
The Commvault software does not support use of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) service endpoints to secure data transfer or data at-rest when protecting FIPS-enabled AWS services. For information see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 on the AWS website.
Job Statuses for Backup Copy Operations
For Feature Release 19 and more recent feature releases, when an IntelliSnap backup includes multiple VMs, if a backup copy job for a specific VM cannot be completed, the backup copy job goes to pending and then retries the backup copy operation, up to the maximum number of job attempts that is configured for the Job Manager. (By default, the number of job attempts is 10.)
Any backup copy jobs that do not complete successfully after the maximum number of attempts are marked as Completed with Errors. If backup copy jobs for any VMs do not complete successfully after the maximum number of attempts, the associated IntelliSnap backup job is marked as Completed with Errors.
For service packs prior to Feature Release 19, if a backup copy operation was successful for any VM in an IntelliSnap backup job, the IntelliSnap backup job was marked as Completed with Errors if backup copy operations were unsuccessful for other VMs that were part of the IntelliSnap backup job, and any unsuccessful backup copy operations for the remaining VMs were not retried.